Stocks drop as a world of worries bedevils investors.
Lanson Jones, an avid tennis player in Houston, did not want to spoil his streak of good health during the pandemic by getting a vaccine.
Then he contracted Covid. Still, he chose not to get vaccinated. Instead, he turned to another kind of treatment: monoclonal antibodies, a year-old, laboratory-created medicine no less experimental than the vaccine.
In a glass-walled enclosure at Houston Methodist Hospital this month, Mr. Jones, 65, became one of more than a million Covid patients, including Donald J. Trump and Joe Rogan, to receive an antibody infusion.
The federal government covers the cost of the treatment, currently about $2,100 per dose, and has told states to expect scaled-back shipments because of the looming shortages. Seven Southern states account for 70 percent of orders.
Amid the din of antivaccine falsehoods circulating in the United States, monoclonal antibodies have become the rare coronavirus medicine to achieve near-universal acceptance. Championed by mainstream doctors and conservative radio hosts alike, the infusions have kept the country’s death toll — nearly 2,000 per day and climbing at a rapid rate — from soaring even higher.
“The people you love, you trust, nobody said anything negative about it,” Mr. Jones said of the antibody treatment. “And I’ve heard nothing but negative things about the side effects of the vaccine and how quickly it was developed.”
But the treatment’s popularity is straining the U.S. healthcare system.
The infusions take about an hour and a half, including monitoring afterward, and require constant attention from nurses at a time when hard-hit states often cannot spare them.
“It’s clogging up resources, it’s hard to give, and a vaccine is $20 and could prevent almost all of that,” said Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist and the chief of population health at Family Health Centers of San Diego, a community-based provider. Pushing antibodies while playing down vaccines, he said, was “like investing in car insurance without investing in brakes.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/09/20/business/economy-stock-market-news/